tags: circumcision A group of Orthodox rabbis has warned that a German court ruling banning infant male circumcision could spread throughout Europe. Some hospitals in Austria and Switzerland have already suspended circumcision because of alleged legal uncertainty.In May a court in Cologne said that circumcision of infant males was illegal, arguing that "the right of parents to raise their children in a religion does not override the right of a child to bodily integrity."Subsequently, in Switzerland the children's hospitals of Zurich and St Gallen announced a moratorium on circumcisions. In Austria the governor of Vorarlberg province told state-run hospitals to stop circumcisions until the legal situation is clarified, although this puzzled Austrian legal experts who said that a decision by a German court was irrelevant."Our fears that the court ruling in Cologne could have a knock-on effect across Europe are now being realized," said Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis.Jews and Muslims, for whom circumcision is an important religious ritual, are outraged. Britain's Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, wrote in the Jerusalem Post earlier this month: "It is hard to think of a more appalling decision. Did the court know that circumcision is Judaism's most ancient historical ritual, dating back almost four thousand years to the days of Abraham?"It could take a long time to resolve the matter. Germany's justice minister has appointed a task force of senior legal experts to draft a law which reverses the court's decision. "The matter is more complicated than just inserting a simple little sentence somewhere, as some people envision," says the minister. "After this emotional debate, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that the law will come before the Federal Constitutional Court. The judges there will have to determine whether they share the balancing of fundamental rights that we intend to make."

A month ago, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz sat down with the host of a Jewish television channel and could not name any reason for Jews to vote for Obama except for his support for abortion. Which is to say that the favorite muppet of the Democratic Party could not think of any reason to support B.O. except a mutual commitment that fewer Jews be born.

It is a little-known fact that Margaret Sanger, that pioneer of eugenic solutions to “racial, political, and social problems,” began by targeting Jews, opening her first center in Brownsville, Brooklyn, complete with Yiddish and Italian flyers, aiming for the two immigrant groups whose high reproduction rates were considered a social problem.

Abortion as a liberal Jewish value has been a stunning success. In New York City, where Sanger first set up shop, 74 percent of all Jewish children are members of the traditionalist Orthodox religious group. Liberal Jews are already panicking over the prospect of a future Jewish population in New York City that is staunchly conservative and religious.

A recent survey of New York City Jews also shows a nearly even split between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. 46 percent of New York Jews are planning to vote against Obama, and a majority of New York City Jews think that Romney would be better at fixing the economy than B.O. But it is only to be expected that the group for whom abortion isn’t a Jewish value would come to outnumber the group for whom abortion is a Jewish value.

The problem with values is that you have to live with their consequences. When your values dictate that terrorists deserve all the protections of the civilian justice system, then you have to be ready to live with the explosions. If your values dictate minimal population growth, then you have to accept the consequences of extinction. Values that are contrary to survival carry their own natural cost. And when your values are at odds with your interests, then your values might as well be an open window, a loaded revolver or a dose of strychnine.

Liberal Jews like to talk about Jewish values rather than Jewish interests, because their values are incompatible with Jewish interests — even as a matter of simple survival. The usual liberal grab bag of values that are represented by the Jewish hand puppets of liberalism, like Wasserman-Schultz, aren’t just alien, they threaten the basic survival of the Jewish People.

When asked to justify what interests the Democratic Party and American Jews have in common, the Jewish liberal dives into a copy of the New York Times and comes up with illegal immigration, abortion, gay rights and support for peace in the Middle East.

That list of liberal Jewish values not only fails to align with a single Jewish interest, but each of them threatens Jewish interests… that is if survival is to be considered a Jewish interest.

Peace in the Middle East means aborting Israel, dissecting it into small pieces and repeating the process until there is no country left. It’s another case of liberal Jews trying to do to Israel what they have already done to themselves. To believe that pressuring Israel into making a non-stop roll of concessions to Muslim terrorists is a Jewish value is to believe that suicide is a Jewish value.

Illegal immigration, a cause that virtually every major Jewish organization has signed on to, means the mass migration of Mexicans to the United States. The ADL’s own survey shows that nearly half of foreign-born Latinos rate as strongly anti-Semitic, over three times the rate of white Americans. (Bad news for the glorious civil rights alliance; the ADL’s strongly anti-Semitic ratings are 12 percent for white Americans, 35 percent for African-Americans and 44 percent for foreign-born Latinos.) The only way to make sense of this is that liberal Jewish groups believe that increasing anti-Semitism in America is actually a Jewish value.

But liberals of all creeds need more Mexican illegal aliens and immigrants from all across the Third World to compensate for the good work of Sanger. Liberal Christians fear the reproduction rates of Conservative Christians as liberal Jews fear the reproduction rates of Orthodox Jews. The only way out of the demographic race is to import “ringers” who will have the children that they won’t. The new eugenics is political eugenics. Birth control is no longer for the people that Sanger considered the “unfit”; they’re valued now for their reproductive rates which help the “fit” stay in power.

Growing anti-Semitism is a small price to pay for the liberal values of having people like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz sitting in Congress instead of selling tie-dyed t-shirts and hand-painted seashell bongs in a flea market. And like all the wages of liberalism, the price for it isn’t paid by the people on top, but by those at the bottom: Those Jews living next to the 44 percent in New York City or on farms in the West Bank within firing range of their Palestinian Muslim peace partners. The Jews whom Sanger and Schultz consider “unfit.”

There is a fundamental gap between the interests of those Jews and those of a liberal elite who claim that their liberal values are our Jewish values. The values of the elite are linked to power while those of the population are linked to survival. The power of liberal Jewish elites is inextricably linked to the decimation of Jewish populations, whether in the United States, Europe or Israel.

Jews who have grown up within the bubble of liberal Jewish values are repeatedly asked to choose between their own interests, their physical, social and economic welfare, and the values that have been presented to them as Jewish values. They are encouraged to believe that betraying their own interests is a noble act of self-sacrifice for the greater good.

This is the same false choice between interests and values, between the low ground of survival and the high ground of moral superiority, that the left subjects all Americans and Europeans to on a regular basis. What all the lecturers on the theme of the moral high ground and the new value system have forgotten to mention is that a value system that is incapable of perpetuating itself is of very little use to anyone. It isn’t even any good as an act of martyrdom because martyrs are remembered by the people who share their beliefs.

Martyrs that live on die for a faith, not for the extinction of a faith. And that is what liberal Jewish values are. The extinction of a faith and a people in the name of a better faith in liberalism and a better people in the form of a multicultural rainbow of other people who have children, but still vote Democratic, because their religious values have not yet been submerged within a liberal identity.

The paradox of the multicultural alliance is that the political survival of the narrow wedge of liberals at the top depends on a larger wedge of non-liberals who vote for them but don’t share their values. If the minority communities adopted the full panoply of liberal values, they would be on the same path to extinction as the people for whom they have been taught to pull the lever on Election Day.

That is what makes the multicultural alliance into a frighteningly unstable beast which is always at risk of either breaking left or breaking right and must be constantly replenished through fresh supplies of immigrants who are still economically liberal and socially conservative enough to keep the system going.

Jewish liberals are stuck in a particularly hellish version of this paradox preaching an extinction-based value system that is doomed to lose the race to traditionalists. And the only way out is to try and suborn and break down the values of Jewish traditionalists more aggressively in order to gain fresh recruits for their zombie army of the living dead.

Margaret Sanger at least understood that “the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit’ … can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes.” Birth control teaching without eugenics would never be enough, but the age when the government can mandate a One Child Policy is not yet here. And even if it did arrive, it would still lead to a higher birth rate for couples in traditional marriages.

The race between traditional Jewish values and liberal Jewish values must always end in the same way over and over again. Suicide can never become a Jewish value unless it is universalized and it can never be universalized until every traditional group is broken down. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has already lost and she probably knows it. If she doesn’t, the Jewish Federations who are busy typing up the survey results certainly do. And while that will lead them to redirect more money to groups such as Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and Uri L’Tzedek which act as leftist outposts of the war on traditional Judaism — that too is another race they cannot win.

In Israel and America, the proponents of Jewish suicide are successfully wiping themselves out, while the proponents of Jewish survival are filling up cradles. The race between the Jewish values of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and their values is already being won.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

There are not enough Jewish voices on the right side of history. Too many aligned with Bolsheviks during early 20th century Russia. Too many took reformed Judaism as a serious discipline. Too many turned their backs during World War 2. Too many align today with The Democratic Party.

President Obama has weakened America’s involvement with Israel in the public relations arena. He’s been seen on many occasions as disrespectful to the investment of American dollars made for making sure that Israel remains free.

Here comes the Anti-Defamation League. They claim to have been battling bigotry towards American Jews since 1913. Certainly, they were a pivotal organization on this front. What have they achieved? Are Jews more widely respected? No. The same animosity is leveled at the Jewish community and one could postulate, in ever greater proportions, than has been experienced in times past.

In America, the term Zionism has been lionized as the cry to excite Jewish hatred. It’s everywhere. There are scores of folks all over the country who attribute America’s reserve currency status as being tainted by the Zionist cause. There are conspiracy theorists that link the House of Rothschild arm in arm with the Rockefeller’s, and Israel is a creature of the Rothschild’s bearing down on the British crown in early 20th century international politics via The Balfour Declaration.

In the last 60 years the force of governmental legislation against bigots has not lessened bigotry. Discrimination is a matter of personal choice. It will always be that way. It may be against the law but there are always ways to skirt the law by the well chosen use of words which describe any particular discrimination as something other than what it is.

It was the Anti-Defamation League that was out in front against “hate speech.” It has not stopped any hatred. If anything it has had the opposite effect. People will always make choices they feel comfortable with whether or not it’s popular. Hate speech is “thought police” politics and it has been legislated as against the law. When you suppress speech by claiming that “emotional damage” occurs in the feelings of those the speech was directed at, it is reasonable to posit that emotional pressure builds all the more for those who wish to express their hate. Thus, it becomes an emotional powder keg which builds to explode at some point in the future. We see examples of this all over the political landscape today, whether it’s the LGBT’s, Blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Asians or many other minorities embedded into America’s population.

The “anti hate speech” agenda today is being shown as a failure and for what it is, a statist policy gone sour. One can’t go for a day without someone crying foul about someone’s expression of animosity and then seen somewhere in the day’s headlines.

Leaders in the Jewish community continue to embarrass Jews as a whole. To the lay population, it matters not how tied to their faith these Jewish leaders are, it only matters that they’re Jewish, and they must be stopped.

The Anti-Defamation League has largely failed in its mission to secure favorable “political thoughts” about the Jewish peoples in the population at large. Now they’re attacking one of the Jewish community’s staunch defenders, Pamela Geller.

Ads are running across the country sponsored by Geller’s AFDI not-for-profit corporation. AFDI stands for American Freedom Defense Initiative. Pamela Geller is the American lightning rod who bravely warns the American population about the stealth jihad and its invasion into American culture and her politics.

The Anti-Defamation League and many others in America do not fathom the real idea behind Islam or Muslims in general. Those in the know understand that it is a geopolitical agenda disguised as a religion. Its very essence is a lie compounding other lies. Do not underestimate the wiles of the Muslim population at large or what is being said from the pulpits of mosques around the country. Do not underestimate the wink and nod gestures amongst the leaders of Islam and their adherents.

The term Islamophobia is a code used by leftists to make unpopular a healthy gut level reaction for Jewish, as well as American preservation. In other words, there is nothing wrong with not wanting too much fraternity with the Muslim world and its geopolitical goals. Therefore, to be an Islamophobe is a good thing.

Better yet, should we all just embrace Iran’s latest menacing rant? Exactly what is the Muslim Brotherhood in America doing to curb the speech and invective of the Iranian leadership?

If we take the tack of ADL’s latest agenda, which on the surface would seem to be, dial down the rhetoric for or against anything, and let things be without drawing too much attention to it, what will be the result from Islam’s leaders other than perceived weakness?

If the phrase “never again” doesn’t mean anything to the ADL or those aligned with them, then they are obvious apologists of the grossest kind. They inspire weakness, not strength. Moreover, to make this statement: “Being pro-Israel doesn’t mean being anti-Muslim and anti-Arab. Suspecting a “jihadist” motivation by everyone who follows Islam contributes to an atmosphere where hatred and discrimination are easily justified. Geller has a First Amendment right to spread her views, but she does Israel no service by her bigoted attacks on all Islam. The ADL hopes that our Muslim neighbors recognize that Geller’s campaign reflects the thinking of a very small minority in the Jewish community and trust that they also understand, as do we, the dangers posed by extremists in all of our faiths.” is admitting that discrimination of any kind doesn’t serve the idea of preservation in the face of another discrimination, like those espoused by the seat of Islamic power, Iran. Let’s not forget America’s interests in the matter.

“Israel’s interests” as depicted in the previous paragraph by the Scarsdale Chair of the ADL, John Harris, must not be to preserve itself. Israel is derided everywhere in the public relations machine of the Arab and Muslim press. So Israel and her proponents should just shut their mouths accordingly. If Mr. Harris could point to a time in history when Jews, by remaining silent or amiable, were allowed to live in peace, we’d welcome the reply and example. Of course, he will not be able to illuminate such a point.

So, philosophically what does Pamela Geller achieve with AFDI’s latest initiative? Pamela Geller shows strength where a weakness is perceived. Pamela Geller shows backbone where a supple spine fails and has always failed. She stands proud as an American Jew who is a political conservative instead of shrinking from the critics, her largest being the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood arm of American political discourse, The Council of American Islamic Relations.

If the ADL wants to do something about Jewish public relations in America that would be positive, perhaps they should have a talk with George Soros or Jaimie Dimon, or for that matter, the entire Hollywood-Broadway machine of America’s entertainment industry, who’ve all abandoned what earlier notable founding Jewish moguls adhered to, something called, The Hayes Code.

Perhaps if proud Jews were to do something positive like policing their own by having frank discussions with leftist apologists from within our community, away from the light of day, and say to these folks, start showing a better example in your person, there would be a trend to take root that would portend well for coming generations of Jews everywhere.

Pamela Geller in the meantime, will take the heat other Jews would feign to bear up against in the face of geopolitical religious tyranny, and continue her mission, rest assured on that point. Men in the ADL and the leftist Jewish community should take note. Will it take sides with a courageous advocate for American values, and Jewish preservation, or will it submit to the dhimmitude, which is the expected result of Islam and its adherents, for waging the war of this stealth jihad, disguised as moderate Islam?

The ADL submits their “opinion” about Ms. Geller here and wants you to accept this as fact. Instead what it does, in our opinion, is promote acceptance of weakness and moderation which is unreasonable to assume. The ADL wants you to believe they’re for securing an “equal outcome” against all discrimination for all peoples who’ve been discriminated against. What they fail to recognise is twofold: 1. Talk is cheap and 2. You cannot legislate good grooming, decorum or behavior.

Behavior is precisely the point.

Perhaps the ADL can explain where moderate Islam has sprouted from the Jewish example? Israel has allowed the Dome on The Temple Mount to stand in Jerusalem, and has shown tolerance by doing so. What has this tolerance wrought? To be precise, only more hatred, or to put it another way, nothing.

The article below is Ms. Geller’s post we are in strong support for. We wish her to continue to be a political conservative and stand as an example for other Jews in America to follow. If you’re a Jew reading this opinion, consider any other alternative to preservation and you will come up empty handed, except to wield a weapon in your defense when faced with annihilation. Discrimination in this case is your ally for survival and not the converse, as apologists like the ADL would have you assume.

If the ADL wants to shake hands with moderate Muslims in this country, perhaps they should ask “that community” to take CAIR to task and tell all of them to stand down and cease those activities on American soil.

We are telling the ADL to rethink their values, and so should every Jew in this country. Jewish orthodox leaders are swinging for the GOP in this next election. Perhaps the rest of the community, and those from the New York, Chicago, Miami and LA communities as well, should learn a new tactic and that is to stand on the right side of history, rather than the left.

Not all Jews are cowards.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

French President François Hollande, center, arrives at the Jewish memorial prior to ceremonies to mark the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Vel d'Hiv roundup, Paris, July 22, 2012

The following is the speech given by President François Hollande to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv Roundup on July 16 and 17, 1942, when the French police arrested 13,152 Jewish men, women, and children from Paris and its suburbs, and confined them to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a bicycle stadium in Paris. They were later deported to German concentration camps. Eight hundred and eleven survived the war. President Hollande delivered his speech at the original site of the demolished velodrome on July 22, 2012.

Prime Minister, President of the National Assembly, ambassadors, Mayor of Paris, President of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, Chief

We’ve gathered this morning to remember the horror of a crime, express the sorrow of those who experienced the tragedy, and speak of the dark hours of collaboration, our history, and therefore France’s responsibility.

We’re also here to pass on the memory of the Holocaust—of which the roundups were the first stage—in order to fight the battle against oblivion and testify to new generations what barbarity is capable of doing and what resources humanity may possess to defeat it.

Seventy years ago, on July 16, 1942, early in the morning, 13,152 men, women, and children were arrested in their homes. Childless couples and single people were interned in Drancy, where the museum created by the Mémorial de la Shoah will stand in the autumn.

The others were taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver. Thrown together for five days in inhuman conditions, they were taken from there to the camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande.

A clear directive had been given by the Vichy administration. “The children must not leave in the same convoys as the parents.” So, after heartrending separations, they departed—the parents on one side, the children on the other—for Auschwitz- Birkenau, where the deportees of Drancy had preceded them by a few days.

There, they were murdered. Solely for being Jews.

This crime took place here, in our capital, in our streets, the courtyards of our buildings, our stairways, our school playgrounds.

It was to prepare the way for other roundups, in Marseille and throughout France—in other words, on both sides of the demarcation line. There were also other deportations, notably of gypsies.

The infamy of the Vel d’Hiv was part of an undertaking that had no precedent and has no comparison: the Holocaust, the attempt to annihilate all the Jews on the European continent.

Seventy-six thousand French Jews were deported to the death camps. Only 2,500 returned.

Those women, men, and children could not have known the fate that awaited them.

They believed that the country of the great Revolution and the City of Light would be a safe haven for them. They loved the Republic with a passion born of gratitude. Indeed, it was in Paris in 1791, under the National Constituent Assembly, that Jews had become fully fledged citizens for the first time in Europe. Later, others had found in France a land of welcome, a chance at life, a promise of protection.

Seventy years ago, this promise and this trust were trampled underfoot.

I would like to recall the words that the [future] chief rabbi of France, Jacob Kaplan, wrote to Marshal Pétain in October 1940, after the introduction of the despicable Statute of the Jews. “As the victims of measures that undermine our human dignity and our honor as Frenchmen, we express our profound faith in the spirit of justice of the Eternal France. We know that the ties uniting us with the great French family are too strong to be broken.”

Therein lies the betrayal.

Across time, beyond grief, my presence this morning bears witness to France’s determination to protect the memory of her lost children and honor these souls who died but have no graves, whose only tomb is our memory.

That is the purpose of the requirement set by the Republic: that the names of those martyred victims should not fall into oblivion.

We owe the Jewish martyrs of the Vélodrome d’Hiver the truth about what happened seventy years ago.

The truth is that French police—on the basis of the lists they had themselves drawn up—undertook to arrest the thousands of innocent people trapped on July 16, 1942. And that the French gendarmerie escorted them to the internment camps.

The truth is that no German soldiers—not a single one—were mobilized at any stage of the operation.

The truth is that this crime was committed in France, by France.

To his great credit, President Jacques Chirac recognized this truth, in this very spot on July 16, 1995.

“France,” he said, “France, country of the Enlightenment and human rights, land of

welcome and asylum, France, that day, was committing the irreparable.”

But the truth is also that the crime of the Vel d’Hiv was committed against France, against her values, against her principles, against her ideal.

Honor was saved by the Righteous, by all those who were able to rise up against barbarism, by those anonymous heroes who hid a neighbor here, helped another there, and risked their lives to save those of innocent people. By all those French people who enabled three quarters of France’s Jews to survive.

France’s honor was embodied by General de Gaulle, who stood up on June 18, 1940, to continue the struggle.

France’s honor was defended by the Resistance, the shadow army that would not resign itself to shame and defeat.

France was represented on the battlefields, with our flag, by the soldiers of the Free French Forces.

She was also served by the Jewish institutions, like the Oeuvre de secours aux enfants [Children’s Welfare Organization], which secretly organized the rescue of more than five thousand children and took in orphans after the Liberation.

The truth does not divide people. It brings them together. In that spirit, this day of commemoration was established by François Mitterrand, and the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah was created under Lionel Jospin’s government. Set up under that same government, with Jacques Chirac, was the Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation Resulting from Anti-Semitic Legislation in Force During the Occupation, whose aim was to put right what still could be put right.

In the chain of our collective history, it now falls to me to continue this common duty of remembrance, truth, and hope.

It begins with passing on the memory. Ignorance is the source of many abuses. We cannot tolerate the fact that two out of three young French people do not know what the Vel d’Hiv roundup was.

The Republic’s schools—in which I hereby voice my confidence—have a mission: to instruct, educate, teach about the past, make it known and understood in all its dimensions. The Holocaust is on the curriculum of the final primary and junior

There must not be a single primary school, junior school, or lycée in France where it is not taught. There must not be a single institution where this history is not fully understood, respected, and pondered over. For the Republic, there cannot and will not be any lost memories.

I personally shall see to this.

The challenge is to fight tirelessly against all forms of falsification of history: not only the insult of Holocaust denial, but also the temptation of relativism. Indeed, to pass on the history of the Shoah is to teach how uniquely appalling it was. By its nature, its scale, its methods, and the terrifying precision of its execution, that crime remains an abyss unique in human history. We must constantly remind ourselves of that singularity.

Finally, passing on this memory means preserving all its lessons. It means understanding how the ignominy was possible then, in order that it may never recur in the future.

The Shoah was not created from a vacuum and did not emerge from nowhere. True, it was set in motion by the unprecedented and terrifying combination of single- mindedness in its racist frenzy and industrial rationality in its execution. But it was also made possible by centuries of blindness, stupidity, lies, and hatred. It was preceded by many warning signs, which failed to alert people’s consciences.

We must never let our guard down. No nation, no society, nobody is immune from evil. Let us not forget this verdict by Primo Levi on his persecutors. “Save the exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces.” Let us remain alert, so that we may detect the return of monstrosity under its most harmless guises.

I am aware of the fears expressed by some of you. I want to respond to them.

Conscious of this history, the Republic will pursue all anti-Semitic acts with the utmost determination, but also all remarks that may lead France’s Jews even to feel uneasy in their own country.

In this area, nothing is immaterial. Everything will be fought with the last ounce of energy. Being silent about anti-Semitism, dissimulating it, explaining it already means accepting it.

The safety of France’s Jews is not just a matter for Jews, it is a matter for all French people, and I intend it to be guaranteed under all circumstances and in all places.

Four months ago, in Toulouse, children died for the same reason as those of the Vel d’Hiv: because they were Jews.

Anti-Semitism is not an opinion, it is an abhorrence. For that reason, it must first of all be faced directly. It must be named and recognized for what it is. Wherever it manifests itself, it will be unmasked and punished.

All ideologies of exclusion, all forms of intolerance, all fanaticism, all xenophobia that seek to develop the mentality of hatred will find their way blocked by the Republic.

Every Saturday morning, in every French synagogue, at the end of the service, the prayer of France’s Jews rings out, the prayer they utter for the homeland they love and want to serve. “May France live in happiness and prosperity. May unity and harmony make her strong and great. May she enjoy lasting peace and preserve her spirit of nobility among the nations.”

All of France must be worthy of this spirit of nobility.

To tirelessly teach historical truth, to scrupulously ensure respect for the values of the Republic, to constantly recall the demand for religious tolerance, within the frame of our laïque [secular] laws never to give way on the principles of freedom and human dignity, always to further the promise of equality and emancipation. Those are the measures we must collectively assign ourselves.

In thinking of the lives never allowed to blossom, of those children deprived of a future, those destinies cut short, we must raise still further the demands we make of our own lives. By refusing indifference, neglect, and complacency, we shall make ourselves stronger together.

It is by being clear-sighted about our own history that France, thanks to the spirit of harmony and unity, will best promote her values, here and throughout the world.

A row over circumcision in Germany has escalated after a formalcomplaint was lodged against a rabbi in the city of Hof. Accordingto a doctor from the city of Giessen, "Religious freedom cannot beused as an excuse for carrying out violence against an under-agechild". The dispute was ignited by a June 26 ruling by a Colognecourt that circumcision of a child constituted "illegal bodilyharm," even with parental consent.

Ever since the German government has been searching for acompromise which will satisfy the Jewish community andinternational critics, while honouring the court decision. ThePresident of the Conference of European Rabbis, PinchasGoldschmidt, has described the decision as "one of the gravestattacks on Jewish life in the post-Holocaust world".

Germany's national Ethics Council (Ethikrat) has recommendedauthorising circumcision if safeguards are in place. "There must bea green light for circumcision but under the conditions of a fullexplanation to the parents, the agreement of both parents, thetreatment of pain and the professional execution of thecircumcision," chairwoman Christiane Woopen said.

But the recommendation was made after a robust debate. A legalscholar, Reinhard Merkel, said that it was "bizarre" that religiouscommunities could be allowed to define when and how a human bodycould be injured. If a child's right to bodily integrity had to beweighed against religious requirements, this was a "legal policycrisis". However, he squared the circle by invoking an"indebtedness" to Jews which called for a "special law".Constitutional law expert Wolfram Hofling, on the other hand,argued that parental rights were paramount. If they believed thatthe ritual was in the best interests of the child then this shouldbe respected, especially since millions of circumcisions haveoccurred without complications.

The row has spread to Scandinavia as well. In neighbouring Denmarkan article in the Politiken newspaper described circumcision as aritual involving the torture of a baby. The Danish Parliament isgearing up for a debate on the issue. Since report by theChildren's Ombudsman in 2003 described circumcision as a violationof children's rights, a ban has a lot of support. Finn Schwarz,president of the Jewish Congregation of Copenhagen, says that ifcircumcision is banned, Jews will have no choice but to pack theirbags and leave.

For many Jews, this is a transcendental issue, despite the smallbut real possibility of harming a child. The deputy prime ministerof Israel, Eli Yishai, wrote a letter to German Premier AngelaMerkel in which he said: "Circumcision is one of the most importantcommandments for the Jewish people, and the first given to one ofthe fathers of our nation, Abraham, as a sign of his eternal treaty[with God]. Even in times of slavery and exile, Jews made sure tofulfil this commandment, and did so happily." German Jews shouldnot have to choose between Judaism and their citizenship.

Germany's Circumcision Police Here's an idea: Send an international delegation of rabbis and imams to seek arrest in protest..Article Comments (32) more in Opinion | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ ».smaller Larger facebooktwittergoogle pluslinked ininShare.0EmailPrintSave ↓ More ..smaller Larger By SHMULEY BOTEACH There was a head-spinning moment in Germany last week: News emerged that a rabbi had been criminally charged for performing his religious duties. Rabbi David Goldberg of northern Bavaria, who shepherds a 400-member community, is the first person to run afoul of a ruling by a Cologne judge earlier this year that criminalized circumcision, a basic religious rite.

There is some precedent outside of Germany for such a ruling. In 2001, a Swedish law sparked a protest from Jews and Muslims by requiring that a medical doctor or anesthesia nurse accompany registered circumcisers, and that anesthesia be applied before the procedure. The law is still in effect.

In 2006, a Finnish court charged a Muslim mother with assault for circumcising her baby, and this was followed by a Jewish couple being fined for causing bodily harm to their son. The Muslim mother wasn't ultimately punished, and in 2006 the Finnish Supreme Court said her actions weren't criminal and religious circumcision not a crime. In the United States, a San Francisco ballot initiative tried last year to make circumcision an offense punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison; it failed to get enough votes. (In Germany, the Cologne judge seems not to have not yet specified punishment for violations.)

The ban by the court in Cologne, however, is the most troubling. For decades Germany has been an example of how a nation can take responsibility for its previous crimes. It is very moving to see Germany's Holocaust memorial in Berlin, just two blocks from the country's parliament. But the circumcision ban deserves universal scorn.

The American and European rabbinate should lead a delegation of mohelim (ritual circumcisers) to Germany to seek arrest for civil disobedience in protest against government persecution. I would join them and call upon Islamic imams to stand with us.

Does the German government really want to get into a public battle over whether they are better guardians of the health and welfare of Jewish (and Muslim) children than their parents?

The Los Angeles Times recently cited a study predicting that as the number of circumcisions goes down in the U.S., the cost of health care will steadily climb. Eryn Brown reported that "If circumcision rates were to fall to 10% . . . lifetime health costs for all the babies born in a year would go up by $505 million. That works out to $313 in added costs for every circumcision that doesn't happen."

Why? Because circumcision has been proven to be the second most effective means—after a condom—for stopping the transmission of HIV-AIDS, with the British Medical Journal reporting that circumcised men are eight times less likely to contract the infection.

The New York Times echoed these findings in an Aug. 27 report that projected "declining U.S. circumcision rates could add more than $4 billion in health care costs in coming years because of increased illness and infections." The story focused on the American Academy of Pediatrics updating its 13-year-old policy on circumcision and declaring that the health benefits of circumcision—in reducing chances of HIV infection and other STDs, urinary tract infection, and cancer—outweigh the risks.

While the Germans decry the barbarity of circumcision for men, they also overlook the benefit to women who are the men's partners. Male circumcision reduces the risk of cervical cancer—caused by the human papillomavirus, which thrives under and on the foreskin—by at least 20%, according to an April 2002 article in the British Medical Journal.

While some attempt to equate male circumcision with female clitoridectomy, the comparison is absurd. Female circumcision involves removing a woman's ability to have pleasure during sexual relations. It is a barbarous act of mutilation that has no corollary to its male counterpart. Judaism has always celebrated the sexual bond between husband and wife. Attempts to malign circumcision as a method of denying a man's sexual pleasure are ignorant. Judaism insists that sex be accompanied by exhilaration and enjoyment as a bonding experience that leads to sustained emotional connection.

We Jews must be doing something right in the bedroom given the fact that, alone among the ancient peoples of the world, we are still here, despite countless attempts to make us a historical footnote.

A German judge may think he is a better guarantor of Jewish well-being than Jews themselves. No thanks.

Rabbi Boteach's books include "Kosher Jesus" (Gefen, 2012) and "Kosher Sex" (Doubleday, 1999). He is a Republican candidate for the U.S. Congress from New Jersey's ninth district.

You said, "The double-standard here is really staggering - and indicative IMHO of the growing acceptance of anti-Semitism in the U.S. and around the world."

The article talks about public ads.Yet, I couldn't find any "anti-Semitism" public ads referenced. Objectivist1 could you provide a few "anti-Semitism" public ad's in America examples?

By the way, please make sure you distinguish between "anti-Semitism" and "anti-Israel" policies. The two are not blindly congruous as many American Jewish groups will confirm.Supporting the plight of the Palestinians, or hoping for peace in the Middle East, or opposing the bombing of Iran, the annexation of Jerusalem, etc. are NOT "anti-Semitic".

My Grandfather is Norwegian. Norway is a great place; I like Norwegians, however at all times what is good for America comes before my warm thoughts for Norway. And if I/you supportwhat's good for what we believe is best for America, and Norway suffers in our opinion, that doesn't mean we hate Norwegian's, it merely means you disagree with Norway's State policy.The same applies to Israel; I and others can criticize Israel if we believe their policies do not coincide with what we think is best for America. That does not mean I or millions of others,including many Jews in America are anti-Semitic.

And Objectivist1, if you could find someone, anyone, other than from Pam Geller's page a few people might start listening to you.

Once again, JDN refuses to cite any of the assertions made in Geller's piece, and instead chooses to portray her as non-credible. After repeated attempts by me, Crafty and others to persuade him to actually take issue with specific assertions in the articles posted here, he falls back on the tired, leftist tactic of smearing the messenger. It's really quite tiresome, childish and frankly pathetic. I submit that it is JDN who is generally not taken seriously here, because this character assassination and reference to others who condemn the messenger he happens to despise is apparently all he is capable of.

Henceforth (and I've broken this rule too many times already with regard to him) I will not waste any time responding to "arguments" - from JDN or others - which amount to nothing but ad hominem attacks and/or compurgation. I have MUCH better things to do with my time than respond to dullards who are by definition incapable of independent thought and argumentation. I consider it rather self-evident that the majority of the readers of this forum are able to distinguish between an honest attempt at a discussion and the tactics of what is commonly known as an "Internet troll."

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

Objectivist1; I think nearly everyone, even on this site, think Pam Geller is a bit Wacko. Only you......

However, giving the benefit of the doubt, I did read the piece. No where could I find reference toa public advertisement that was "anti-Semitic". So I asked you for examples; evidence, facts.....

I forgot that's a problem for you; you prefer sleaze and rumors.

Actually Ojbectivist1 YOU are the troll; you have a one track mind; all Muslims are bad and evil. Your most frequent (only) sited source;Pam Geller. Truly you should post of the humor page. Along with the Martians are coming.

You don't have to respond to my arguments; actually you never have before; you just post more Pam Geller.

But I hope you don't mind if I post in response to your sleaze and sensationalism. It's kinda fun and easy to refute. Like arguing with that 5 year old neighbor who keeps yelling, "The Martians are coming; they are behind every tree, run for your life!". It's pointless, but kinda fun and entertaining.

With all due respect, I don't think Pam Geller is honestly citable; she is usually fallible and inflammatory; she is a racist; that said, if alternative sources are cited as well from learned souces, that would strengthen the arguments. But quoting her cite alone leaves one open to ridicule.

I never said that Objectivist1 "only" cites Pam Geller or her website, however he does so too way too frequently, probably 90%+ on this site and the Islam in America site, resulting in no credibility. Is the only source he reads Pam Geller and her website? Surely there are more learned individuals who could be quoted to make his point? Or if not, maybe he has no point?

I do agree YOU cite numerous sources, many are valid, not all with whom I agree, but that is why we have a forum; to discuss diverse opinions. I have found the diverse arguments on circumcision rather interesting for example.

Why do countries with long histories of anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry seem to care more about the so-called rights of young children not to be circumcised than do other countries in the world with far better histories of concern for human rights? The same rhetorical question can be asked of countries, such as Norway, that care so much about the rights of animals not to be slaughtered according to Jewish ritual. These questions are entirely rhetorical because every thinking person knows the answer. It’s not because Germans or Norwegians are better people and care more about children and animals than do Americans. It is because they care less about Jews. Or more precisely they care a lot about Jews. They just don’t like them very much and don’t care if they are forced to leave the country because they cannot practice their religions there.

So let no one praise a nation that murdered a million Jewish babies and children for shedding crocodile tears over the plight of the poor little baby boy who, following a many thousand year old tradition, is circumcised a week after birth. Every good person should condemn Germany for what really lies at the heart of efforts to ban circumcision—old-fashioned anti-Semitism, a term coined by Germans for Germans and against Jews.

History is not irrelevant in assessing current policies. The history of Germany (and Norway) in prohibiting Jews from practicing their traditional rituals goes back to a time when overt anti-Semitism was not only acceptable, it was de rigueur. Today, new words replace discredited old ones. Anti-Zionism instead of anti-Semitism. The welfare of children instead of the banning of religious rituals. But it’s all the same. Anyone who falls for the new pseudo scientific nonsense about the evils of circumcision or ritual slaughter is as naïve or bigoted as those who fell for the old pseudo scientific racial claims of Nazism.

Indeed, there is an ugly whiff of “racial superiority” in the implicit assumption underlying these bigoted laws: Namely, that Germans and Norwegians are somehow morally (if not racially) superior to other countries that permit such “barbaric” practices.

So let’s call a spade a spade and let’s call anti-Semitism by its true name.

How then should reasonable people respond to these unreasonable efforts to make it difficult to practice traditional Judaism? Some have called for a legal response. Perhaps. But fighting these bigoted practices in court plays into the hands of those who are proposing it. In Nazi Germany, respected jurists were able to use the law to justify the most primitive forms of racism. Indeed Nazism operated through the Nuremburg laws and other such anti-Semitic legal enactments, which were declared entirely lawful by the German courts. Efforts to use the law against these manifestations of racism backfired, by legitimating the Nazi’s legalistic undertakings. So let those who seek to challenge these laws do so but not without understanding the downside of such action.

Some may suggest that the alleged science purporting to support these bans be challenged on the basis of scientific truth. Perhaps. But that too may play into the hands of those who would argue that even acknowledging a possible scientific basis for these bigoted proposals lends some legitimacy to them. “Science” too was used to support Nazi racial studies. Should German scientists now conduct “twin studies” on circumcised and uncircumcised siblings? Why is Germany not willing to accept the conclusion reached by the American Academy of Pediatrics following a five year review of the best research, that “the health benefits” of circumcision – including reduction of HIV and papillomavirus transmission – “out weight the risks?”

The best response is to shame the Germans into rejecting this new form of left wing anti-Semitism, by showing them how similar it was to the Nazism they now claim to abhor. This approach will not work in Norway, because Norwegians have forgotten their history and still believe they were victims of Nazism rather than collaborators. Norway’s anti-Semitic laws preventing Kosher slaughter of animals date back to the pre Nazi period and have remained in force since that time. Norway seems to have no shame nor is it capable of being shamed. Many Germans, on the other hand, seem willing to remember the past—at least up to a point. They must confront that past and look into the historical mirror before they once again go down the road of treating their Jewish citizens as second class or worse.

Shame on those Germans who would ban circumcision. Shame on those Germans who do not care enough to rise up in anger against the pseudo scientific bigots who falsely claim to be interested in the sensitivities of children. Praise for those Germans who do stand against the bigotry of their countrymen.

Let other countries with cleaner hands take the lead in conducting real scientific research and in seeking to protect the rights of children and animals. The dirty hands and filthy past of Germany forever disqualifies that country from leading the effort to ban Jewish rituals. For shame!

This article was published in German by the Juedische-allgemeine.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

Hardly a hate crime. It was simple assault; he was punched in the face. That's it. No staples, etc.

"Our understanding is that the investigation is now nearly complete," the statement reads. "Based on interviews with more than 50 witnesses who were at the party that night, the East Lansing Police have apparently concluded that while the student was the victim of a serious physical assault, the evidence does not support his claim that the assault involved anti-Semitic hate speech or gestures, nor does it indicate that the incident was motivated by his religion.

That said, assault is a crime. But let's not make something out of nothing.

BERLIN—A German debate over the legality of ritual circumcision has many in the country's tiny Jewish community re-examining a more existential question: Can Jews feel at home in Germany?

Ambivalence over the answer follows a German district-court ruling in June that ritual circumcision amounted to illegal bodily harm. It was captured in a fury-filled essay this month by Charlotte Knobloch, the 79-year-old former chairwoman of Germany's Central Council of Jews, an umbrella group that represents Jewish community interests to the government.

Ms. Knobloch—a Munich-born Jew who survived the Nazis with the help of Bavarian Catholic farmers who pretended she was their daughter—has spent much of her adult life defending to Jews abroad her decision to stay in a post-Holocaust Germany. But in the wake of the decision, she said she was questioning her convictions.

"For the first time in my life, I feel resignation," she wrote in the essay in Germany's Süddeutsche Zeitung. Observing the public "bloviating about 'child torture' and 'trauma' " by circumcision opponents, she added: "I seriously have to ask myself whether this country still wants us [Jews]."

The essay contributed to a firestorm that Germany's political establishment has scrambled to quell—with little effect. Opponents to ritual circumcision say the practice violates infant or young boys' bodily integrity and shouldn't be performed until they are old enough to choose it themselves. Although the Cologne court's June 26 ruling carried no legal weight outside that district, and although Germany's government quickly began drafting legislation to affirm the rights of parents nationwide to have their sons circumcised, the decision and the public discourse since have sparked fear and unease among Germany's Jews and Muslims, who also commonly practice circumcision.

Within the small Jewish population, it has re-opened especially deep and complex wounds, and raised new concerns over their standing and religious freedoms in a country that—despite its efforts to re-cultivate a budding Jewish community after decimating it during the Third Reich—remains vastly remote from everyday Jewish life.

So few Germans have any personal connection to Jewish life, that "many feel alienated from Jews," said the 32-year-old Melody Sucharewicz, a Munich-born political communications strategist who splits her time between Germany and Israel. She said she has recently begun wearing her Star-of-David necklace from her childhood as a sign of resolve. "How else could something that is such a normality of Jewish life be picked out and rendered into this huge issue?"

As the debate continues, "my attitude has changed from being fairly casual and lighthearted to increasing concern," said Rabbi Walter Rothschild, an English rabbi who has lived in Berlin the past 14 years. Though he says he feels at home in Germany, the steady stream of hostile mail he has received since the ruling has unsettled him, he says.

"It's not even anonymous anymore," he said. "To me, it seems there is clearly a latent desire among parts of the German population to attack the practices of minority religions."

The ruling has unleashed a torrent of condemnation from Jewish and Muslim groups in Germany and abroad, and prompted a letter from Israel's president Shimon Peres to his German counterpart, Joachim Gauck, imploring Germany to end the legal uncertainty around circumcision. Reflecting her country's unique sensitivities to accusations of religious intolerance, Chancellor Angela Merkel also has urged quick action, saying Germany would be the world's "laughing stock" if it were to stifle Jews in practicing their religion. In July, more than 600 professionals and academics signed an open letter, published in Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, arguing the point, saying "religious freedom can't be a blank check for [sexual] violence against underage boys."

A leading member of Germany's Humanist Society called the practice a "relic of the ancient past," while the German Association of Pediatricians said it would join in any suit challenging a potential law protecting the practice.

More legal battles appear inevitable. A doctor last month filed the first legal complaint against a German rabbi for performing ritual circumcisions, accusing Rabbi David Goldberg in the German town of Hof of doing bodily harm. Local prosecutors said they are still weighing whether the complaint merits a formal investigation into the matter. Rabbi Goldberg, one of just a few rabbis in Germany who perform circumcisions, has said he will continue the practice, given there is no law forbidding the practice.

Many German Jews say the mainstream platform such criticism of ritual circumcision has received makes them particularly uneasy. A recent survey of 1,000 respondents by German polling group TNS Emnid in July showed 56% of Germans agreed with the Cologne ruling. "It's not the normal anti-Semitism that one can easily brush off," said Jonas Fegert, a 21-year-old Jewish political-science student at Berlin's Free University. "It's framed as these enlightened legal scholars explaining to Jews that their old traditions are wrong and unmodern."

The debate comes amid what has been widely described as a budding Jewish renaissance in Germany, home to some 104,000 Jews. That figure compares with the more than 530,000 Jews who lived in Germany before Hitler came to power, but is many times the few thousand left after the war. Many of Germany's Jews today are Conservative or Orthodox Jews who came from the former Soviet Union after the German government made it easier for them to obtain citizenship during the 1990s. In recent years new synagogues, seminaries and other signs of Jewish life have sprung up across the country.

But behind the recent vibrancy, tensions persist that have been pulled back into the spotlight by the circumcision debate. Reported anti-Semitic violence declined last year to 29 cases nationwide, according to police. But the August street attack of a Berlin rabbi by four teens of Arab descent in front of his six-year-old daughter sent shock waves through Berlin's Jewish community, and verbal threats and other forms of abuse often go unreported. A German Parliament-commissioned study presented early this year reported that "despite Germany's constant confrontation with its Nazi past" some 20% of Germans held latent anti-Semitic beliefs.

On June 26, the District Court of the Federal State of Cologne ruled that circumcision of children for religious reasons at the instruction of parents constituted the infliction of bodily harm and therefore was a punishable offense. As the judges concerned included their email addresses and telephone numbers in a press release, concerned individuals might wish to express their views directly.

Your Honors: Your decision last week to criminalize the religious rite of circumcision presents a threat to the survival of the German people. Germans are failing of the desire to live. At your present fertility rate of 1.3 children per female, there will be virtually no

German speakers left to celebrate Goethe's quadricentennial, although a few Jewish scholars still might learn German as a supplement to Yiddish. In more ways than you imagine, this decision poisons the hearts of your countrymen and reduces their long-term prospects for survival.

Whether the Constitutional Court will uphold your decision remains to be seen; in the meantime, you have put the life of Germany's small Jewish community into suspension. Physicians at the Jewish Hospital in Berlin have stopped performing circumcisions for fear of legal action. Even worse: you have provided a pretext for every Jew-hater in Germany to denounce a fundamental practice of our religion on the spurious pretext of child welfare.

Not even the Nazis thought of banning circumcision as a way of uprooting Jewish life in Germany. If your decree withstands a constitutional challenge, Germany once again will be Judenrein. The difference today is that you need us more than we need you.

Never mind that your decision involved the case of Muslim parents circumcising a child for religious reasons. The matter of circumcision comes to the West through the Jews, regardless of the Muslim imitation Jewish practices. This is our issue, and you will answer to us in the court of world opinion.

In danger of extinction: Germans aged 15 to 24 vs over 60, at constant fertility

Source: United Nations World Population Prospects

To suggest that circumcision impairs health is silly on the face of it, considering that the Jewish people, alone among all the peoples of the world, have endured through these past 4,000 years - not in spite of circumcision, but rather because of it, as I shall explain.

The State of Israel, the only country in which almost every male is circumcised, has the world's highest life expectancy at 82 years (in a tie with Japan and Switzerland). The average Israeli man can expect to live four years longer than the average German man. Israel also has the highest fertility of any industrial country, at three children per female. If the respective fertility rates of Germany and Israel continue, there will be more Israelis under the age of 25 than Germans by the end of the present century.

I will not address the scientific grounds for circumcision (which among other things drastically reduces the transmission of infections including AIDS), because your decree has nothing to do with science. Rather, as Heinrich Heine wrote in 1844 of your city of Cologne, Dummheit und Bosheit buhlten hierGleich Hunden auf freier Gasse;Die Enkelbrut erkennt man noch heutAn ihrem Judenhasse.(Stupidity and evil mated here / Like dogs in the open gutter / You still can recognize their descendants today / By their Jew-hatred). What we call the b'rit, or covenant, brings the sacred and eternal into the carnal and temporal sphere of human life. That is the content of Jewish practice: the sanctification of eating through kashrut, of the family through the laws of marital purity, and of time itself through the observance of the Sabbath. But circumcision precedes all of these. It denotes what all the peoples of the world desire: to be holy (that is, eternal) in their own flesh. It is the token of God's love for Israel set in the body of Israel itself, the sign of our immortality. God's love for Abraham extends to his descendants, and circumcision denotes the transformation of Jewish flesh to a holy vessel for God's presence in the world.

The great Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod wrote: God could have played a godly role, interested in certain features of human existence, the spiritual, but not in others, the material. He could even have assigned the man the task of wrenching himself out of the material so as to assume his spiritual identity, which is just what so many religious believe he did. Instead, the God of Israel confirms man as he created him to live in the material cosmos ... There is a requirement for the sanctification of human existence in all of its aspects. Israel's symbol of the covenant is circumcision, a searing of the covenant into the flesh of Israel and not only, or perhaps not even primarily, into its spirit. And that is why God's election is of a carnal people. By electing the seed of Abraham, God creates a people that is in his service in the totality of its human being and not just in its moral and spiritual existence [1]. Israel is the exemplar and model for the sanctification of the human body, for the dedication of the individual to God through a physical change, through the sanctity of family life, and the sanctity of all life embodied in our dietary laws. But if you excise the sacred from human life, life itself becomes intolerable. I submit that the Germans are in danger of extinction because they have ceased to tolerate life.

On this matter I refer you to the decisive passage in the iconic literary work of your culture, the wager between Faust and Mephistopheles in the second Studierzimmer scene of Goethe's Faust I. Goethe is the most biblical of modern writers, [2] perhaps the only one to restate the existential question of Ecclesiastes so clearly. [3]

The devil offers Faust the usual inducements: money, fame and sex. But what Faust wants rather is life - a real life, such as all of humanity lives: What is apportioned to all humankind,Would I enjoy in my inmost self,Grasp the highest and lowest with my spirit,And bring their weal and woe into my own breast.Mephistopheles answers with contempt. Mere mortals, he tells Faust, cannot abide life, which was made for a God: Believe me, who for millennia pastHas chewed on this hard crust:From cradle to the graveNo man ever has been able to digest this sourdough!Believe our kind: this wholeWas made only for a God!He basks in light eternal.Us he brought down into darkness,While all you get is day and night.Your Honors: Believe us Jews, who have eaten our bread with joy for so many thousands of years, and who say each morning, "Happy are we, how good is our portion, how lovely our fate, how beautiful our heritage." Mephistopheles is not entirely wrong: life was indeed made for a god. But what God has made also can be imparted to human beings. We cannot be gods, but we can be godly.

What makes it possible to digest the sourdough of life is to impart the sacred to everyday life. That is why - as the demographers have shown - only the religious have birth rates above replacement in the industrial world.

Germany drove out the divine with fire and sword. Now it chews the old sourdough with disgust. Germany's sin was to envy us, rather than to emulate us. The great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig wrote of this envy before his death in 1929. The Gentile nations of the ancient past accepted their eventual extinction, he explained, until they learned of the hope of eternal life from the Jews.

The God of Israel first offered eternal life to humankind, and Christianity extended Israel's promise to the nations. But the nations longed for eternal life in their own Gentile skin rather than in the Kingdom of God promised by Jesus Christ. After Christianity taught them the election of Israel, the Gentiles coveted the election of the Jews and desired their own people to be the chosen people.

Rosenzweig hoped that the Jewish example - of a people whose immortality vouchsafed the Christian promise - would inspire Christians to value the enduring presence of the people of Israel. Mercifully he died before National Socialism took envy of the Jewish people to a new and hideous extreme by positing the German "master race" as a neo-pagan lampoon of Jewish election. The Germans have failed as pagans, and they are failing as Christians. Eventually they might fail of their own lack of interest in life.

The neo-pagan illusions of National Socialism have been crushed, although they lurk at the fringes of German politics. Despite their defeat, the National Socialists may have succeeded in extirpating the presence of the divine in German life. No action by responsible public officials since the end of the war has advanced their cause as forcefully as the evil degree you have promulgated.

You no longer have the power to destroy us, but you yet may destroy yourselves. We, the Eternal People, who have seen so many good things disappear from under the sun, will view this with sadness.

Hochachtungsvoll,Spengler

Notes: 1. In The Body of Faith: God and the People Israel, (1983), p672. See the author's essay "Hast Thou Considered My Servant Faust?"3. See "Koheleth and Goethe's Faust," by Rabbi Isaac Rosenberg

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. His book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) was published by Regnery Press in September 2011. A volume of his essays on culture, religion and economics, It's Not the End of the World - It's Just the End of You, also appeared this fall, from Van Praag Press.

Objectivist1. I had thought you got the message; everyone agrees Pam Geller is a wackier than a .... (I can't think of anyone wackier and more absurd than her).

Yet again, you post Geller twice in a row. Or, if not Geller, before often you post jihad something or another's website; it's all the same from you here and on the Islam site. That's seemingly it. Geller and Jihad.... is your sole source. You have NO respected sources, no academic sources, no independent sources, no intelligent sources, you have no one except a wacko and her band of merry cohorts. It would be funny except you try to act serious. As I suggested, go outside, talk to your neighborhood kid about the Martians landing; you will find far more truth. Time for you to grow up and learn. YOU have become a joke, although maybe I don't get the humor; is it all a joke Objectivist1? Why do you continue to post garbage; or is that all you know? Or are you just lazy and won't search anywhere else? Or is the answer is that there is no one else?

Ahhh and I thought you had agreed, Geller was ....., but you defended Spencer (we discussed) and McCarthy (I agreed; credible). I guess that's my misunderstanding; still I'm a bit surprised that you find Geller "quotable" in a search for the truth.

In the interest of fairness, I hope you don't mind if I start quoting pieces frequently (that will be easy) and equally biased (again....) albeit opposite of Ms. Geller?I'll find someone equally outspoken/outlandish/racist; but don't worry, I'm sure their reputation will be equal to hers and in the interest in truth you will wantto hear both (biased) sides.

It is your sandbox, but I notice if you don't like a particular article and find it "specious" and/or the source of the article questionable, you are the firstto point it out.....

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/09/wake-up_jews.html#ixzz27x08dEm0No doubt, it's hard for people to give up their lifelong attachments and identity. But there are moments in history when a turning point arrives, and those with eyes to see and ears to hear recognize it. Many Jews have made political liberalism their religion and personal identity and the Democrat Party their unexamined home and comfort zone. But everything changed early September.Rarely do modern-day political conventions startle. The Democratic National Convention, however, was earthshaking and a warning to Jews to wake up. Democrat delegates decided to stick it to Israel. We no longer care, they roared, if Israel remains a Jewish state; flood her heartland with millions of so-called Palestinians whose goal is to make the state Islamic. We will not condemn Hamas for targeting Jewish population centers with rockets. Jerusalem is not Israel's indivisible capital but should be divided, like Berlin was. Such was the undeniable sentiment of the delegates at the Convention.After objections from outside the Convention, the chairman reinstated support for Jerusalem. But he was resoundingly booed. The world saw how those boos far outweighed the yeas. My fellow Jews, the boos were for you; those boos were for Israel, a successful Israel that sticks in the craw of a leftist, socialist mindset that sees Israel not as the beacon of freedom and accomplishment she is, but as something outside the leftist ideological orbit. Sure, they will take your contributions and your votes, but they don't want your Israel, and they expect you to forgo distinctly Jewish needs on the altar of leftism. We saw not liberalism, but hardcore leftism, and we saw a home where the welcome mat is quite conditional and worn out.The prophet Daniel saw the writing on the wall. All too often throughout our history, we Jews, and especially heads of major Jewish organizations, have failed to see the writing on the wall. We are afraid to see that which is a game-changer, and so we deny events we wish were not happening. After all, who wants to change the comfort zone?It was a convention, like the last four years of the Obama administration, reveling in class warfare. Class warfare, like Occupy Wall Street and other scapegoating calls, has never been good for the Jews. We are often the scapegoat of those envious. Knowing this, Ahmadinejad scheduled a meeting with Occupy, a movement endorsed last year by many bigwigs in the Democratic Party and even President Obama himself. Jihadists and much of Islam want to delegitimize the concept of a Jewish state by tarnishing Jews as "those rich capitalists" unworthy of a state among the community of nations.Too often, we Jews have been beguiled into believing that Jews in positions of power have our interests at heart. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is but the latest who would have us think she is "doing what is good for the Jews" when, in fact, she is doing and will continue to do what is good for Debbie and her power base. Similarly, the heads of the major Jewish organizations have been conspicuously silent -- a silence that would not prevail if a Republican were doing the things to Israel Obama is doing.Job openings are way down; 50% of college graduates, our children, can't find jobs; and Mr. Obama will continue to weaken national security and thus the safety of our families...and continue to make it more difficult for Israel to survive. For many, all this is secondary and expendable for their more important agenda of abortion on demand and gay marriage. How frivolous; how irresponsible!We can determine what truly is important to a person when he is forced to choose between two values. Since when is it a Jewish value to condemn Israel to misery just so one can be assured of abortion at any time, under any circumstance? Most of your grandparents would have chosen Israel over abortion and gay marriage. As our sages tell us: "The wages of immorality are further immorality."President Obama has time to meet with Muslim Brotherhood Morsi of Egypt, who has declared his intention to get rid Israel, but Mr. Obama has no time to meet with Israel's Netanyahu, whose country is under imminent nuclear threat from Iran. Israel's concern about a possible nuclear Holocaust is, for Mr. Obama, dismissed as mere noise, while his delegates at the U.N. on Sept. 24 are ordered to sit and listen to the vile noise of the Holocaust-denier and Iranian Jew-hater-in-chief. It is clear that Mr. Obama's underlying sympathy is with the Muslim Brotherhood and its spread and influence around the world. He is coaxing us to accept Islamic attitudes and norms. This speaks volumes -- to those willing to see the facts as they truly are.My friends, get off the train, now. The track is pointing in a very dangerous direction. You will not prevail over the trend; on the contrary, you will become part of the trend. As an elder clergyman, I'm horrified as I watch many Jews -- young and old -- slowly evolve into proponents of positions unwholesome, dangerous, and destined toward spiritual and physical suicide.True, you will be forced to stop your demonizing of Republicans. You may have to vote for Romney, a candidate singular in his passion and love for Israel as a living concept, an indivisible Jerusalem, and for Israelis and Jews as Jews. You will have to wipe away the gruesome fantasies you have concocted about Republicans and conservative Americans. That's OK. In fact, it is a nice thing to do and is good for the soul.Rabbi Aryeh Spero is author of Push Back: Reclaiming our American Judeo-Christian Spirit. (212) 252-6861; www.caucusforamerica.com

"We are not dealing with a Youtube video or a lone extremist Imam, but a call to anti-Semitic violence by a man who has tens of millions of followers and leads the organization that controls Egypt's future. It cannot be business as usual in Washington when such an assault is launched against the Jewish people." Indeed. Badie said: "The jihad for the recovery of Jerusalem is a duty for all Muslims." But Obama will pay no heed to this call from the Wiesenthal Center, and the mainstream media will not call him on it.

An update on this story. "Wiesenthal Center: Obama should sever ties with Brotherhood," from the Jerusalem Post, October 13 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

The Simon Wiesenthal Center on Friday called on US President Barack Obama to publicly condemn the latest call for jihad against Israel by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie and to sever all contacts with the organization until the threat is withdrawn.The Center's call comes after Badie reportedly said in his weekly message to supporters that "The Jews have...spread corruption on earth [and] spilled the blood of believers," and therefore Arabs Should confront the Jewish state "Through holy jihad, high sacrifices and all forms of resistance."

In a joint statement, Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, respectively founder and dean and associate dean of the Center, denounced Badie, saying his "rant confirms our long held view that Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is the most dangerous anti-Semitic organization in the world today."

According to the statement, "We are not dealing with a Youtube video or a lone extremist Imam, but a call to anti-Semitic violence by a man who has tens of millions of followers and leads the organization that controls Egypt's future. It cannot be business as usual in Washington when such an assault is launched against the Jewish people."

They concluded by urging "President Obama to condemn the rhetoric and cut off all official and unofficial US contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood until they desist from their hate and war mongering."

Posted by Robert on October 14, 2012

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

By RUTH R. WISSE No citizens would seem to need a strong America more than the Jews, who are once again targeted by aggressors seeking to destroy what they cannot attain. Iran develops the bomb and threatens to annihilate the Jewish state. Fundamentalist-controlled Egypt threatens to abrogate the treaty that cost Israel the Sinai Peninsula. Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza vie over which is Israel's more effective enemy, with the latter firing more than 400 rockets into southern Israel so far this year.

Israel rejects having any foreign soldier defend its soil, but no country the size of New Jersey can permanently withstand such disproportionate force without countervailing support from a greater power.

The positive basis for such support was spelled out by Mitt Romney this summer on his visit to Israel: common belief in democracy and the rule of law, common practice of free enterprise, and common freedom of expression that includes the freedom to criticize. The defensive rationale for supporting Israel is that, as Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has put it, "those who single out the Jewish people as a target of racial and religious bigotry will inevitably be a threat to all of us."

These affinities explain why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was cheered when he told the U.S. Congress last year that "Israel has no greater friend than America and America has no greater friend than Israel." Through military intelligence and experience, it is sometimes Israel that protects America.

Given the unique danger to the Jewish state and Israel's exceptional role in the defense of democracy, one might expect American Jews to vote for whichever party and politician is likelier to secure both countries. But Unlike Christians, Muslims and many others, Jews are a self-defined minority with a strategy of political accommodation to surrounding majorities. Whether out of fear or hopes for peace, many Jews have ingested the accusations against them, hoping to avoid conflict by holding Israel responsible for the aggression against it. Consequently, Jews can be found among those Americans who believe that their weakness—and that of Israel—would advance world peace.

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CloseAssociated Press .Jews don't necessarily vote with Israel in mind, but for those who do, the choice has never seemed clearer. President Obama's call last year for Israel to return to its 1967 borders—the roughly nine-mile diameter that invited combined attacks from Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization—horrified Susan Crown of Chicago, who had been an Obama bundler in 2008: "Telling all the people who have lost loved ones in the 1967 war, that we were going to have a 'do-over,' really made me mad," she told an Illinois "Women in Leadership" forum this month.

Earlier, in a speech in Cairo entitled "A New Beginning," Mr. Obama courted Arab favor as mediator between Islam and Christianity. His speech extolled the "religious tolerance and racial equality" practiced by the two societies, and he ascribed equal responsibility to Israelis and Arabs for regional hostility.

The clearest argument for choosing Republican over Democratic leadership in the coming election was made inadvertently by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who wrote recently that the GOP was returning to "the moral, muscular foreign policy" that Mr. Obama scuttled. When Ms. Dowd called Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan the "puppets" of Dan Senor (a former Bush administration official who has co-authored a book on Israeli entrepreneurship), she meant they, unlike the president, are enthusiastic and unapologetic supporters of Israel. When she said that neoconservatives are "slithering back," Ms. Dowd merely confirmed, albeit in slimy language, the obvious choice for voters who want America to take leadership of a free and safer world. You just have to know how to read.

Yet most Jews and leaders of Jewish organizations urge their coreligionists to keep voting for the president whose party has adopted the most tepid position on Israel in recent times. Edgar Bronfman, the former president of the World Jewish Congress, wrote recently that, "Not long ago, while sitting in the Oval Office, Obama looked me in the eye and said, 'My commitment to Israel's security is bone deep.' " Or, as my Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz wrote: "Several months ago, President Obama invited me to the Oval Office to discuss his Iran strategy. He looked me in the eye and said, 'I don't bluff.' "

A president prepared to hypnotize so many Jews into promoting his campaign might have done better to invite back to the Oval Office the prime minister of the country they claim to be looking out for.

Every day brings fresh anxieties. The fate of America's ambassador to Libya and the subsequent White House handling of the attack might give pause to those who trust that President Obama "has Israel's back." And Jews aren't the only Americans looking for resolute policies of deterrence in the Middle East.

Ms. Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of "Jews and Power" (Schocken, 2007).

Crafty - one thing this professor says regarding her colleague Alan Dershowitz is very true and has always baffled me: He is on the one hand a staunch defender of Israel and has gone to the mat many times against people who demonize that state and promote Palestinian lies, which are endless. HOWEVER - he does appear to by "hypnotized" by Obama, and unable to criticize his foreign policy, particularly in regard to Israel.

Something truly bizarre is at work here that so many otherwise intelligent American Jews are fooled into supporting this President. It is mind-boggling, and recalls nothing so much as the large percentage of European Jews in the late 1930s who failed to see the writing on the wall right in front of their faces. One would think they would have learned this horrific lesson from their brethren who survived. That they have failed to do so is chilling.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

In November 1947, the United Nations was considering the creation of a Jewish state in parts of Western Palestine and a new Arab state in the other parts. The hopes of the Jews rested in large part on China. The five-member Security Council had to approve putting the resolution before the General Assembly, but China, one of the five, was threatening to veto it. The head of the Chinese delegation was approached by a hero of the Chinese campaign against the Japanese during World War II, a man who had been a general and senior adviser to President Sun Yat-sen. The general persuaded the delegation to abstain. The Security Council voted approval and the Partition Resolution was sent to the General Assembly, where it passed. Modern Israel came into existence. The general who persuaded the Chinese not to oppose the resolution was not Chinese himself – but, in fact, a Jew born in Poland in 1887.

Morris Abraham Cohen was brought to London from Poland when he was still a toddler and grew up in the impoverished East End of London. By the time he was 12 he had become a skilled boxer and a pickpocket. He quickly amassed a police arrest record and his family sent him to reform school until he was 16. Once released, he went to Canada to work on a farm in rural Saskatchewan, near some Indian reservations. The farming bored him; he preferred work as a carnival barker and con man. This got him arrested yet again and he did some jail time.

While wandering the Canadian West he became friendly with the local Chinese. Cohen liked Chinese cuisine (what Jew doesn’t?) and the Chinese outlook on life. One day Cohen wandered into a Chinese eatery and realized the owner was being robbed. Cohen beat the robber to a pulp. The Chinese were so impressed, they embraced Cohen as one of their own. He joined the local chapter of nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen’s political movement and started to pick up some basic Chinese. Cohen raised funds for Sun’s movement and helped procure arms.

After serving in World War I as a Canadian soldier, Cohen headed off in 1922 to China with plans to work as a railroad developer. But once in Shanghai he found work as a writer on the English-language newspaper associated with Sun Yat-sen’s movement.

The Chinese called him Ma Kun (“clenched fist”), which was as close as they could get to Morris Cohen. He procured arms for a warlord of Canton in the 1920s and was adviser to Wu Tiecheng, the Canton police chief who later became mayor of Shanghai. Cohen began to serve as part of Sun’s guard force, and eventually commanded the entire 250-man presidential bodyguard unit. Always armed, Cohen managed to defend Sun from more than one assassination attempt. After Cohen was wounded in his hand while driving off one group of assassins, he started carrying a second pistol and local Westerners immediately dubbed him “Two-Gun” Cohen, the nickname he carried with pride for the rest of his life.

Eventually he was appointed head of the Chinese secret service. His sidekick was another Jew, an anti-Soviet Russian named Moses Schwartzberg who had been part of a plot to assassinate Lenin in 1918. Because of the importance of the Schwartzberg-Cohen pair, Yiddish became one of the three languages of the Chinese secret service, after Mandarin and English. Schwartzberg would later organize a regiment of 1,200 Jewish volunteers to fight for Israel in its War of Independence.

After Sun Yat-sen died, Two-Gun Cohen was named commander of the Chinese 19th field army. He worked for a while for Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek. He led Nationalist troops in fighting against both the Japanese and the Chinese communists. He was the only European ever to serve as a Chinese general. When the Japanese invaded China in the 1930s, Cohen worked for British intelligence. Just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong was invaded by the Japanese. Two-Gun got Sun Yat-sen’s widow out safely on one of the last planes to escape. Cohen himself was captured by the Japanese and thrown into the Stanley Prison Camp, where he was beaten and mistreated.

After the war he lived in Canada, where he helped the Zionists obtain arms for Israel’s War of Independence. He eventually returned to England, where he died in 1970. On his tombstone in Manchester his name appears in English, Hebrew, and Chinese characters. His funeral was attended by representatives from both Chinas, which were still at war with each another. It was the only thing in the world on which they could agree.

There is a special entry about Two-Gun in the Spy Museum in Washington. Two books have been published about Two-Gun’s life.

Rob Reiner is working on a movie about Two-Gun.

Two-Gun’s cousin, the journalist Marion Dreyfus in New York City, tells me her family still has many scrolls and silks that Two-Gun sent them from China. She found a plaque on the wall of the Shanghai synagogue commemorating Two-Gun as one of the ten most important Jews in Chinese history.

When Cohen returned to Manchester after the war, he and his cousins went into the raincoat business, the weather in England being ideal for such a venture. Two pistols and a Chinese generalship notwithstanding, Two-Gun was a proud Jew – and he could even get you a raincoat…………………………….wholesale!

Not all Jews. Just the liberal ones. I sproudly separate myself from them.

Objectivist,

The best explanation I can think of as to why Jews did not learn the lesson from the 30's is they still want to believe that government can be "good".

What does George Soros mean when he speaks that government is not a problem when it is "good government"?

In the late 30s Stalin murdered many Jews. though I haven't finished the book and would otherwise be by no means a scholar on the subjece it appears Stalin was very paranoid of Jews because of their ties to America. America represented this gigantic ideological competitor that Stalin feared. And he feared European and Russian Jews many of whom had relatives friends colleagues in the West and particularly in America. So he murdered many.

While it seems many Jews who came to America embraced the Constitution and the freedoms our founding fathers set up for us.

On the other hand many brought their socialist political philosphies with them from Europe. Many appear convinced that some less stringent form of Marxism is still viable and preferrable. It is interesting how so many big monied Hollywood types have type cast McCarthy for his communist censorship attempts of th 40's(?) and 50s yet are very active participants in cencorship of conservative thought in the MSM. Nothing but their version of political correctness is acceptable.

All I can think of is these Jews still are deluded of the utopia that "good government" can foster. Stlalin/Lenin were mer abberations. Commnuism just didn't get a fair chance. Isn't that what the enlightenede Oliver Stone thinks?

Iran's Press TV scored an international scoop Tuesday. It turns out, it reports, the massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six of their teachers and administrators was not the work of a troubled loner. Rather, it was Israeli death squads exacting vengeance over a recent United Nations General Assembly vote granting Palestine nonmember observer status.In a time of national grieving unmatched since the 9/11 attacks, the Iranian government's English-language news outlet used the opportunity to promote vile anti-Semitic conspiracies so extreme that not even the most strident Islamists have offered anything close to them.

The claim came from Michael Harris, who was one of three panelists in a discussion about the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. While the other panelists focused on a culture of violence in America, or the issue of gun laws, Harris unleashed a torrent of Jew hatred."Hollywood is Jewish owned and Jewish controlled and they spew filth and they spew violence out," he said. Jews are the ones pushing for gun control. Jews control Congress.

"And now here we go, here's a revenge killing in the U.S., sponsored by Israel, that killed all these innocent children," Harris said. "And that is something that Israelis do very, very well. They target the innocent, they target children, they target women and they avoid the issue. Because they're angry they didn't get their way and now Palestine has standing in the U.N. and Israel is going to be subject to the International Criminal Court and their leadership is going to be taken to task. So let's connect the dots here about what's going on globally, geo-politically with Israel involved."

While the other two guests dismissed Harris' theories, saying Israel had nothing to do with Newtown and tried to steer the conversation back to the brutal killing, the Press TV hostess never pushed back. A video of the segment shows Harris spoke longer than the others during the 25-minute segment and was given the last word.

The United States considers Iran the world's leading state-sponsor of international terrorism. But that fact hasn't stopped American Islamists, led by officials from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) from repeatedly appearing on Press TV programs to bash American policy or culture. It might be different if they tried to speak truth to power, criticizing Iran for its terror support or repression of its own people.

But instead, they have blamed America for Muslim riots over the Internet video mocking Mohammed last fall. They have cast America as being at war with Islam, a message considered to be one of the most potent tools in recruiting Muslims to violent jihad, and likened America's treatment of Muslims to the way Jews were treated in Nazi Germany. Examples go on and on.

They grant legitimacy to a broadcast outlet pushing conspiracy theories like a modern Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Press TV followed up the Newtown panel discussion by publishing a story on Harris' theory on its website. "Israeli death squads involved in Sandy Hook bloodbath: Intelligence analyst," the headline blares. It describes Harris as "a former Republican candidate for governor of Arizona and GOP campaign finance chairman."

The Press TV article asserts Israel staged the attack "to teach America a lesson, knowing that America would take the punishment, keep 'quiet,' and let a 'fall guy' take the blame."

If the publishing of cartoons and Internet videos depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad can spark riots and killings throughout the world, what does a blood libel like the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory do to Muslim attitudes toward Jews?

Blaming Zionists and blaming Jews for problems large and small is a reflex action in parts of the Middle East, including claims Jews were behind the 9/11 attacks. Hamas instills it in young children. Islamists in Egypt blamed Jews for a New Year's Eve 2011 bombing at a Coptic church that killed 21 people, a message echoed by Press TV.The article on the Newtown shooting was written by Gordon Duff, identified as "a Marine Vietnam veteran, a combat infantryman, and Senior Editor at Veterans Today." Harris also writes for Veterans Today, including articles defending David Duke as "a shining example of western freedom and democracy."

Another article details his suspicions that Jews, what he calls "organized jewery" was behind Jared Loughner's shooting attack in Tucson that wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six people, including U.S. District Judge John Roll.

"My point here is: will organized jewery, the Neo-Pharisees that comprise the unelected criminal shadow government sacrifice an asset like Congresswoman Giffords to advance their bigger agenda?? You bet they will. The criminals who took down the WTC and the Murrah Building in Oklahoma, will eagerly sacrifice a pawn to pass stricter gun control measures and dis-arm the US population. The armed US population is the biggest obstacle that still exists for the shadow government of the Neo-Pharisees to fully implement a totalitarian state here in the USA, just like they destroyed Czarist Russia and created the Soviet Union, they work day and night to impose that same hell on the citizens of the USA."

Press TV officials should have been aware of Harris' views before they invited him on the air and let him unleash his empty conspiracy theories and hate rhetoric.Duff's Press TV article says Harris points to "the flood of inconsistencies in the 'cover story.'" But those amount to a series of unanswered questions about alleged accomplices and unsourced claims that police gunned down the shooter, Adam Lanza, after he tried to surrender.

"After Harris' broadcast, key members of the military and law enforcement community contacted Veterans Today in full support of Harris' analysis," Duff writes."One three star general is quoted as saying, 'Harris hit the nail right on the head and it is about time someone spoke up.'"What other proof is needed? In the broadcast interview, Harris predicted a grand cover-up by Congress, which he said is owned by Zionists. The absence of proof, therefore, is his proof.

"So any truth of this, if there's going to be, is going to be hidden because Israel wants it hidden because they are once again the guilty party," Harris said. "You have to realize, Israel has been operating death squads in the United States now since Gabby Giffords and Judge Roll were shot in Tucson. There's been other incidences. The Aurora, Colorado shooting that was, again, Israeli death squads operating in the U.S."

Fellow panelist Raynard Jackson, a Washington-based political consultant, called Harris' comments "irresponsible." A third panelist, Don Debar, said that the United States is the "pre-eminent imperial power in the history of the planet." As such, it controls Israel "although there is some backwash in the Congress and other places."

Given the last word, Harris went off on another rant, condemning American drone strikes abroad, which, "again," he said, "it goes back to Israeli influence in U.S. foreign policy." If he had not done so in the previous 20 minutes, he made it clear that he and Iran are on the same page.

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking Published: March 1, 2013 Sunday New York Times

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.

“We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”

The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.

Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear.

The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery — centered in Germany and Poland, but reaching in all directions.

The lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of a multivolume encyclopedia. (The Holocaust museum has published the first two, with five more planned by 2025.)

The existence of many individual camps and ghettos was previously known only on a fragmented, region-by-region basis. But the researchers, using data from some 400 contributors, have been documenting the entire scale for the first time, studying where they were located, how they were run, and what their purpose was.

When Mr. Greenbaum, a volunteer at the Holocaust museum, tells visitors today about his wartime odyssey, listeners inevitably focus on his confinement of months at Auschwitz, the most notorious of all the camps.

But the images of the other camps where the Nazis imprisoned him are ingrained in his memory as deeply as the concentration camp number — A188991 — tattooed on his left forearm.

In an interview, he ticked off the locations in rapid fire, the details still vivid.

First came the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown in Poland, where the Germans herded his family and other local Jews in 1940, when he was just 12.

Next came a slave labor camp with six-foot-high fences outside the town, where he and a sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. After his regular work shift at a factory, the Germans would force him and other prisoners to dig trenches that were used for dumping the bodies of victims. He was sent to Auschwitz, then removed to work at a chemical manufacturing plant in Poland known as Buna Monowitz, where he and some 50 other prisoners who had been held at the main camp at Auschwitz were taken to manufacture rubber and synthetic oil. And last was another slave labor camp at Flossenbürg, near the Czech border, where food was so scarce that the weight on his 5-foot-8-inch frame fell away to less than 100 pounds.

By the age of 17, Mr. Greenbaum had been enslaved in five camps in five years, and was on his way to a sixth, when American soldiers freed him in 1945. “Nobody even knows about these places,” Mr. Greenbaum said. “Everything should be documented. That’s very important. We try to tell the youngsters so that they know, and they’ll remember.”

The research could have legal implications as well by helping a small number of survivors document their continuing claims over unpaid insurance policies, looted property, seized land and other financial matters.

“HOW many claims have been rejected because the victims were in a camp that we didn’t even know about?” asked Sam Dubbin, a Florida lawyer who represents a group of survivors who are seeking to bring claims against European insurance companies.

Dr. Megargee, the lead researcher, said the project was changing the understanding among Holocaust scholars of how the camps and ghettos evolved.

As early as 1933, at the start of Hitler’s reign, the Third Reich established about 110 camps specifically designed to imprison some 10,000 political opponents and others, the researchers found. As Germany invaded and began occupying European neighbors, the use of camps and ghettos was expanded to confine and sometimes kill not only Jews but also homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and many other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe. The camps and ghettos varied enormously in their mission, organization and size, depending on the Nazis’ needs, the researchers have found.

The biggest site identified is the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, which held about 500,000 people at its height. But as few as a dozen prisoners worked at one of the smallest camps, the München-Schwabing site in Germany. Small groups of prisoners were sent there from the Dachau concentration camp under armed guard. They were reportedly whipped and ordered to do manual labor at the home of a fervent Nazi patron known as “Sister Pia,” cleaning her house, tending her garden and even building children’s toys for her.

When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.

I actually did post this earlier - not sure if it was in this thread or not. Regardless - very interesting that the NYT will even publish this story, considering the fact that they tried to whitewash the Holocaust during WWII until the very end, when it could not be denied any longer.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

It was at Terezín in 1944 that imprisoned Czech conductor Rafael Schächter led a chorus of his fellow Jewish prisoners -- most of them doomed to the gas chambers at Auschwitz -- in brazenly performing Verdi's Requiem before the very Nazis who had condemned them to death. One of the most complex and demanding of chorale works, Verdi's 1874 Requiem was originally intended as a musical rendition of the Catholic funeral mass. Rafael Schächter took Verdi's music and transformed it into a universal statement, one proclaiming the prisoners' unbroken spirit and warning of God's coming wrath against their Nazi captors.

Why are the Jews So Powerful?Posted on May 6, 2013 by alaiwahBy Farrukh SaleemThe writer is the Pakistani Executive Director of the Center for Research and Security Studies, a think tank established in 2007, and son in law of Khalilur Rehman of the Jang Group.There are only 14 million Jews in the world:seven million in the Americasfive million in Asiatwo million in Europe100,000 in Africa .For every single Jew in the world there are 100 Muslims.Yet, Jews are more than a hundred times more powerful than all the Muslims put together.Ever wondered why?Jesus of Nazareth was Jewish.Albert Einstein, the most influential scientist of all time and TIME magazine’s ’Person of the Century’, was a Jew.Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis was a Jew.So were Karl Marx, Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman.Here are a few other Jews whose intellectual output has enriched the whole humanity:Benjamin Rubin gave humanity the vaccinating needle.Jonas Salk developed the first polio vaccine.Albert Sabin developed the improved live polio vaccine.Gertrude Elion gave us a leukemia fighting drug.Baruch Blumberg developed the vaccination for Hepatitis B.Paul Ehrlich discovered a treatment for syphilis.Elie Metchnikoff won a Nobel Prize in infectious diseases.Bernard Katz won a Nobel Prize in neuromuscular transmission.Andrew Schally won a Nobel in endocrinology.Aaron Beck founded Cognitive Therapy.Gregory Pincus developed the first oral contraceptive pill.George Wald won a Nobel for our understanding of the human eye.Stanley Cohen won a Nobel in embryology.Willem Kolff came up with the kidney dialysis machine.Over the past 105 years, 14 million Jews have won 15-dozen Nobel Prizes while only three Nobel Prizes have been won by 1.4 billionMuslims (other than Peace Prizes).Stanley Mezor invented the first micro-processing chip.Leo Szilard developed the first nuclear chain reactor;Peter Schultz, optical fibre cable;Charles Adler, traffic lights;Benno Strauss, Stainless steel;Isador Kisee, sound movies;Emile Berliner, telephone microphone;Charles Ginsburg, videotape recorder.Famous financiers in the business world who belong to Jewish faith include:Ralph Lauren (Polo),Levis Strauss (Levi’s Jeans),Howard Schultz (Starbuck’s) ,Sergey Brin (Google),Michael Dell (Dell Computers),Larry Ellison (Oracle),Donna Karan (DKNY),Irv Robbins (Baskins & Robbins) andBill Rosenberg (Dunkin Donuts).Richard Levin, President of Yale University, is a Jew. So are Henry Kissinger (American secretary of state), Alan Greenspan (Fed chairman under Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush), Joseph Lieberman (US Senator), Madeleine Albright (American secretary of state), Casper Weinberger (American secretary of defense), Maxim Litvinov ( USSR foreign Minister), David Marshal ( Singapore ‘s first chief minister), Issac Isaacs (governor-general of Australia ), BenjaminDisraeli (British statesman and author), Yevgeny Primakov (Russian PM), Barry Goldwater (US Senator), Jorge Sampaio (president of Portugal ), John Deutsch (CIA director), Herb Gray (Canadian deputy PM), Pierre Mendes (French PM), Michael Howard (British homesecretary), Bruno Kreisky (chancellor of Austria ) and Robert Rubin (American secretary of treasury).In the media, famous Jews include:Wolf Blitzer (CNN), Barbara Walters (ABC News), Eugene Meyer (Washington Post), Henry Grunwald (editor-in-chief Time), Katherine Graham (publisher of The Washington Post), Joseph Lelyveld (Executive editor, The New York Times), and Max Frankel (New York Times).The most beneficent philanthropist in the history of the world is George Soros, a Jew, who has so far donated a colossal $4 billion most of which has gone as aid to scientists and universities around the world.Second to George Soros is Walter Annenberg, another Jew, who has built a hundred libraries by donating an estimated $2 billion.At the Olympics, Mark Spitz set a record of sorts by winning seven gold medals; Lenny Krayzelburg is a three-time Olympic gold medalist.Spitz, Krayzelburg and Boris Becker (Tennis) are all Jewish.Did you know that Harrison Ford, George Burns, Tony Curtis, Charles Bronson, Sandra Bullock, Billy Crystal, Woody Allen, Paul Newman,Peter Sellers, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Douglas, Ben Kingsley, Kirk Douglas, Goldie Hawn, Cary Grant, William Shatner, Jerry Lewis andPeter Falk are all Jews.As a matter of fact, Hollywood itself was founded by a Jew.Among directors and producers, Steven Spielberg, Mel Brooks, Oliver Stone, Aaron Spelling ( Beverly Hills 90210), Neil Simon (The Odd Couple), Andrew Vaina (Rambo 1/2/3), Michael Man (Starsky andHutch), Milos Forman (One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Douglas Fairbanks (The Thief of Baghdad ) and Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters) are all Jewish.So, why are Jews so powerful?Answer : EDUCATIONWhy are Muslims so powerless?There are an estimated 1,476,233,470 Muslims on the face of the planet: one billion in Asia, 400 million in Africa, 44 million in Europe and six million in the Americas . Every fifth human being is a Muslim; for every single Hindu there are two Muslims, for every Buddhist there are two Muslims and for every Jew there are 100 Muslims. Ever wondered why Muslims are so powerless?Here is why: There are 57 member-countries of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), and all of them put together have around500 universities; one university for every three million Muslims.The United States has 5,758 universities and India has 8,407.In 2004, Shanghai Jiao Tong University compiled an ‘Academic Ranking of World Universities’ , and intriguingly, not one university from Muslim-majority states was in the top-500.As per data collected by the UNDP, literacy in the Christian world stands at nearly 90 per cent and 15 Christian-majority states have a literacy rate of 100 per cent.A Muslim-majority state, as a sharp contrast, has an average literacy rate of around 40 per cent and there is no Muslim-majority state with a literacy rate of 100 per cent.Some 98 per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Christian world had completed primary school, while less than 50 per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Muslim world did the same.Around 40 per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Christian world attended university while no more than two per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Muslim world did the same.Muslim-majority countries have 230 scientists per one million Muslims. The US has 4,000 scientists per million and Japan has 5,000 per million.In the entire Arab world, the total number of full-time researchers is 35,000 and there are only 50 technicians per one million Arabs. (in the Christian world there are up to 1,000 technicians per one million).The Muslim world spends 0.2 per cent of its GDP on research and development, while the Christian world spends around five per cent of its GDP.Conclusion: The Muslim world lacks the capacity to produce knowledge!Daily newspapers per 1,000 people and number of book titles per million are two indicators of whether knowledge is being diffused in a society.In Pakistan , there are 23 daily newspapers per 1,000 Pakistanis while the same ratio in Singapore is 360. In the UK , the number of book titles per million stands at 2,000 while the same in Egypt is 20.Conclusion: The Muslim world is failing to diffuse knowledge. Exports of high technology products as a percentage of total exports are an important indicator of knowledge application. Pakistan ‘s export of high technology products as a percentage of total exports stands at one per cent. The same for Saudi Arabia is 0.3 per cent; Kuwait , Morocco , and Algeria are all at 0.3 per cent, while Singapore is at 58 per cent.Conclusion: The Muslim world is failing to apply knowledge. Why are Muslims powerless?…..Because we aren’t producing knowledge,…..Because we aren’t diffusing knowledge.,…..Because we aren’t applying knowledge.And, the future belongs to knowledge-based societies.Interestingly, the combined annual GDP of 57 OIC-countries is under $2 trillion.America , just by herself, produces goods and services worth $12 trillion; China $8 trillion, Japan $3.8 trillion and Germany $2.4 trillion (purchasing power parity basis).Oil rich Saudi Arabia , UAE, Kuwait and Qatar collectively produce goods and services (mostly oil) worth $500 billion; Spain alone produces goods and services worth over $1 trillion, Catholic Poland $489 billion and Buddhist Thailand $545 billion.….. (Muslim GDP as a percentage of world GDP is fast declining).All we do is shout to Allah the whole day and blame everyone else for our multiple failures!Muslims are not happyThey’re not happy in GazaThey’re not happy in EgyptThey’re not happy in LibyaThey’re not happy in MoroccoThey’re not happy in IranThey’re not happy in IraqThey’re not happy in YemenThey’re not happy in AfghanistanThey’re not happy in PakistanThey’re not happy in SyriaThey’re not happy in LebanonSo, where are they happy?They’re happy in AustraliaThey’re happy in EnglandThey’re happy in FranceThey’re happy in ItalyThey’re happy in GermanyThey’re happy in SwedenThey’re happy in the USA & CanadaThey’re happy in NorwayThey’re happy in almost every country that is not Islamic!And who do they blame?Not Islam…Not their leadership…Not themselves…THEY BLAME THE COUNTRIES THEY ARE HAPPY INAnd they want to change the countries they’re happy in, to be like the countries they came from, where they were unhappy.Try to find logic in that!Jeff Foxworthy on Muslims:1. If You refine heroin for a living, but you have a moral objection to liquor. You are a Muslim2. If You own a $3,000 machine gun and $5,000 rocket launcher, but you can’t afford shoes. You are a Muslim3. If You have more wives than teeth. You are a Muslim4. If You wipe your butt with your bare hand, but consider bacon unclean. You are a Muslim.5. If You think vests come in two styles: bullet-proof and suicide. You are a Muslim6. If You can’t think of anyone you haven’t declared Jihad against.You are a Muslim7. If You consider television dangerous, but routinely carry explosives in your clothing. You are a Muslim8. If You were amazed to discover that cell phones have uses other than setting off roadside bombs. You are a Muslim9. If You have nothing against women and think every man should own at least four. You are a Muslim